We study the relationship between inequality and social instability. While the argument that inequality can be damaging for the cohesion of a society is well established, the empirical evidence is mixed. We use a novel approach to isolate the causal relationship running from inequality to social...

Explicit and implicit incentives and opportunities for mutually beneficial voluntary cooperation co-exist in many contractual relationships. In a series of eight laboratory gift-exchange experiments, we show that incentive contracts can lead to crowding out of voluntary cooperation even after...

When faced with the choice of behaving corruptly, are people more willing to accept a bribe or to embezzle money? Situations of bribery and embezzlement usually differ in their decision-making dynamics, with bribery requiring coordination between decision-makers (i.e., briber and bribee) while...

We experimentally examine how incentives affect conditional cooperation (i.e., cooperating in response to cooperation and defecting in response to defection) in social dilemmas. In our first study, subjects play eight Sequential Prisoner's Dilemma games with varying payoffs. We elicit second...

This paper proposes that the ambiguity reflected by a set of priors remains unchanged when the set is translated within the probability simplex, i.e. ambiguity is location invariant. This unifies and generalises numerous influential definitions of ambiguity in the literature. Location invariance...

This paper studies responsibility attribution for outcomes of collusive bribery. In an experiment, participants labeled as either citizens or public officials can propose a bribery transaction to another participant (labeled as either public official or citizen, respectively), who decides...

The importance of social identities (e.g. race, gender, political ideology) in economic interactions is well established, but little is known about how people strategically manipulate the visibility or salience of their multiple identity types. This paper experimentally explores a common type of...

We experimentally explore public good production levels, and the endogenous formation of network structures to facilitate output sharing, among agents with heterogeneous production costs or valuations. Results corroborate the key theoretical insights of Kinateder & Merlino (2017) characterizing...

We report a laboratory experiment testing whether social reference points impact effort provision. Subjects are randomly assigned the role of worker or peer and the worker observes the peer's earnings before participating in a real-effort task. Between treatments, we exogenously manipulate peer...

The disposition effect is the reluctance to sell assets at a loss relative to a salient point of reference, typically assumed to be the purchase price. Using data on stocks and housing sales, we show that the peak price achieved by an asset during the investor's period of holding constitutes an...